Dominic Sandbrook, the respected British historian, admits 'similarities of
phrasing' but denies claims of plagiarism.

Jonah Lehrer resigned from his job at The New Yorker magazine last month after he was forced to admit that he fabricated Bob Dylan’s quotes in a book. Now, the journalist who exposed him, Michael Moynihan, has turned his sights on Dominic Sandbrook, the respected British historian.

Moynihan, an American, claims that Sandbrook “shamelessly and repeatedly cannibalizes the work of others”.

He highlights several passages in the historian’s book Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right.

In one, Sandbrook vividly describes the 1976 bicentennial celebration in Boston: “As the orchestra reached the climax of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the church bells pealed, howitzers thundered, fireworks sent shards of color wheeling through the sky, and red, white, and blue geysers burst from a fireboat behind the Hatch shell.”

Moynihan points out that the historain has simply grafted together one sentence from a 1976 Time magazine article, “As the orchestra reached the climax of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, howitzers boomed, church bells pealed”, with another from J Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, “geysers of red, white, and blue water burst from a fireboat behind the band shell”, with a bit of strategic re-editing.

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Moynihan says: “Both sources are named in the book’s footnotes, but in the text the sentence is passed off as the author’s own.”

Sandbrook admits to Mandrake: “Sure, there are sometimes similarities of phrasing. There are only so many ways you can say something.”

He adds: “Like any broad popular history, Mad As Hell inevitably draws on a wide number of sources, including the scholarship of other historians – as I explicitly acknowledge in my section on sources at the end of the book. Almost every single paragraph in the book has an endnote acknowledging its intellectual and factual debts.”